Medicinal artifacts and documentary sources are used to explore health and medical care in the late nineteenth-century iron company town of Hammondville, New York. Vital records and contemporary newspaper accounts provide information about health conditions at Hammondville and offer insights into the villagers’ access to and acceptance of the care provided by the company physician. Archaeological materials from four domestic sites provide additional information about health and medical care in the village. The archaeological investigations, which included shovel test pits and limited excavations, resulted in the recovery of medicinal artifacts used by households of different economic statuses and cultural backgrounds. Material culture and documentary sources from Hammondville reflect the ways village residents from different backgrounds negotiated their relationships with company-provided medical care, incorporating the services of the company physician within their own cultural ideas and practices about health and healing, and coping with the limitations of nineteenth-century medical care.

This article addresses a key question attending contemporary sound studies, how do cities shape, intervene in and manage auditory cultures? Focussing in particular on Madrid of the first republic and restoration (to 1931), this chapter seeks to make sense of some of the ways in which power, politics and shifting imaginations of the seat of government are also reflected in new imaginations of the city as a soundscape. How did shifting segmentational logics of the city, shifting fashions, and changes in the public imagination of cities as sites of both sociability and isolation impact on the sonic liveability of the city of Madrid? The chapter draws on a range of primary sources, including literature, music, architectural theory, theses on sound reproduction technology, treatises on government and political pamphlets, to sketch a series of discursive shifts that occurred in the habitus of the city, changing the cultural function of listening, eavesdropping, and auditory surveillance. In addition, the chapter seeks to understand some of the ways in which some of these shifts impacted on musical cultures of the city, in particular changing attitudes to the suitor management of what Antonio Negri as referred to as ‘the commons’. The notion of a shared, universally accessible and owned public space. What, I ask, were the terms on which a new auditory commons emerged in Madrid? What mechanisms were used to understand, manage and shape this commons?

This paper presents a statistical study of the components on VLSI chips. We examine the size and shape of components, and their placement over the chip area. The data is useful for building efficient VLSI design tools: the form of the distribution shows that some simple strategies ...